"There is no loud or obvious tragedy coming," he writes, "only a secret failure in the midst of success. But [Oliver] is a wonderful noble boy, if only I am able to make the reader see it." Synopsis Santayana separated the book into five parts. He named the different sections of the book according to how each individual period of time matched up with Oliver Alden's life: Ancestry, Boyhood, First Pilgrimage, In The Home Orbit, and Last Pilgrimage. Part I: Ancestry Part I provides the necessary back story on the characters who shape Oliver's childhood and helps us understand the significance of Oliver's conflict: the conflict between Oliver's sense of duty and his “true nature”. The section begins with Nathaniel Alden, Oliver's reclusive Puritan uncle, and we are clued into his life and his philosophy. It is easy to dismiss Nathaniel as a prig, but his philosophy is practical enough and his life is in such unwavering unison with his beliefs, (a unison hard to find in many of the characters) that he serves as a good example of an early American Puritan unaffected, or just escaping, the oncoming genteel tradition. The detailed caricature of Nathaniel is significant because it shows how he affects Peter's life, which in turn, affects Oliver's. Nathaniel's problem is that his beliefs are so strong that he doesn't validate any world view except his own. In the book A Philosophical Novelist, George Santayana says, "Nathaniel is an unwitting purveyor of Epicurean atomism to his half brother, accidentally encouraging in him a cynical tendency toward self indulgent agnosticism." Nathaniel fails to see Peter's potential; he is distracted by Peter's curiosity and favor for recreation and hanging out with "heathens." He sees Peter's actions as evil and feels a need to force change in the young boy's life. Nathaniel wants Peter to follow the will of God – prudent and tempered living with a respect for the social order of that time. When Peter began to go in a direction that he felt was unbecoming of a young man, Nathaniel tries to prove how loyal he is to God's will by sending Peter west to a camp for wayward youth. Further analysis on Ancestry The first section of the novel, "Ancestry", sets the tone for the rest of the story. We see the ancestral ground work for the development of Oliver's mental conflict, his dedication to duty.